Symbian for Software Leaders: Principles of Successful Smartphone Development Projects

Chapter 20. Designing for smartphones

The licensing question

Symbian's focus on smartphones arose from the confluence of several strands of events. One of these sequences of events gathered pace in the mid 1990s. In 1995, analysts and journalists seemed to delight in posing the following question to Psion representatives: Would Psion die like Apple, or would Psion die like IBM?

At that time, Psion was widely perceived (in Europe, if not further afield) as having the best PDAs available – the same way as Apple was widely perceived to have the best desktop computers. However, Apple's software system was only available on Apple hardware; likewise, Psion's software system was, at the time, only available on Psion hardware. So, in both cases, third-party developers needed to take a leap of faith before learning how to program for this software system. The leap of faith was that the limited hardware platform would be strong enough, by itself, to drive sufficient volume sales to repay the investment.

In contrast, Microsoft Windows was seen as markedly inferior to Apple's software system, but it was available on an increasing number of different hardware devices. Some of these different hardware manufacturers failed and went out of business, but others brought some additional market distribution and market share, selling PCs to many people who previously hadn't thought of buying such a device. Because of the larger volume sales, Windows was a more attractive proposition for the third-party ...